Beth Glascott: A Lifelong Commitment to Students

BETH GLASCOTT:A Lifelong Commitment to Students

by Ray Bailey OPC ’09

When Beth Glascott arrived at Penn Charter in the fall of 1982, she knew that she was fond of the place. But it wasn’t a four-decades of-service kind of fondness—at least not immediately. And for all that she ended up accomplishing at PC, her intentions were, at that point, relatively humble.

“I thought I’d stay here for a few years and figure out what I wanted to do when I grew up,” Glascott said from her office below the clock tower, just months shy of her spring 2022 retirement. Somewhere along the line Penn Charter must have grown on her.

Over the course of those 40 years Glascott forged an equally influential presence in PC’s classrooms, playing fields and administrative offices, balancing her science teaching schedule with duties as Middle School assistant director, Upper School director, assistant head of school and, finally, associate head of school. She had a seat at the table for every strategic planning initiative and capital campaign to move through the school since the mid-’90s. She led two accreditations with the National Association for Independent Schools and a Quaker self-study with the Friends Council on Education—notoriously complicated processes of institutional self-reflection.

“It’s no secret I get to do that work because I’m highly organized,” said Glascott, who is also highly modest. Her deep familiarity with academics, athletics and administration across two school divisions left her well-positioned to synthesize the big and small picture of life at Penn Charter and to articulate a vision for its future. Her savvy with spreadsheets and schedules was a bonus, for sure, but certainly not the main reason Glascott was entrusted with this kind of higher-order institutional thinking.

“Beth has the rare ability to think strategically, see the big picture, but attend to every detail,” said Head of School Darryl J. Ford Hon. 1689. “This skill set enables her to move the organization forward from every level of decision making.”

And whether she was preparing her next Oceanography lesson or envisioning the next 50 years of PC education, it was all fundamentally the same work to Glascott. It was always rooted in students.

“The joy in that [big picture] work comes from thinking about possibilities for Penn Charter, and particularly for the kids at Penn Charter, and then working to make things happen,” she said.

A Curiosity for the World

The Glascotts were an active family. Beth’s parents—mom a geriatric nurse and dad a university athletics administrator—spent their summers working at Camp Tecumseh in New Hampshire. They passed on their love for sports and the outdoors to their children from a young age, and for eight weeks out of the year, Beth’s brother, Bob, joined his parents at Tecumseh, a boys camp, while Beth and her sister, Meg, went to Songadeewin, for girls, in Vermont.

Glascott’s passion for marine biology on display in 1989.

Those summers were formative for Glascott.“Being outside, the hiking, canoeing, the sports—that was really, really important to me,” she said. “I think it led to all three of us being athletic, but also just having this greater curiosity for the world.”

Beth Glascott Hon. 1689 in her early days at PC, pictured with Middle School students and teaching partner Susan Vengrove. “Because of her longevity at the school,” Head of School Darryl J. Ford said, “Beth is able to remember historical context and how it informs current practice.”

One of the ways that curiosity manifested was in an interest in biology. After graduating from Plymouth Whitemarsh High School, Glascott earned a bachelor of science from the University of Pennsylvania, then began master’s work at the University of Rhode Island, where she found the school of oceanography to be too stifling for her wide-ranging interests. “It wasn’t interdisciplinary enough,” she said. Glascott was wary, also, of the rigidity of academic science, with its relentless cycles of research and grant writing, so she pivoted, returning to Penn to pursue a master’s degree in secondary science education.

It was during her final semester in that program, in the spring of 1982, that Glascott got a call from PC Head of School Earl J. Ball Hon. 1689, who was working his connections at Penn to try and fill a last-minute vacancy in Middle School science. “The program at Penn was strong, and Beth was highly recommended,” Ball remembered. “She offered a wonderful combination of teaching and coaching.”

Over the course of two days of interviews, then- Director of Middle School Stephen Watters and future Science Department chair Alice Davis left strong impressions on the fledgling educator. Glascott could envision a home for herself—however temporary—at 3000 West School House Lane. “I appreciated the rich intellectual experiences that the kids were getting, the fact that they did athletics, they did arts,” she remembered.

Glascott was won over by that earlier, all-boys version of Penn Charter, even as she anticipated the shift to full coeducation that had been recently approved by PC’s board. “I knew the girls were coming, and if the school hadn’t gone coed, I don’t know that I would have stayed as long as I did,” she said.

It would be another 10 years before the first modern coed class would process across the commencement patio in 1992. During that transitional period, Glascott and a small contingent of women faculty would provide critical support for PC’s girls as they charted new territory within the 300-year-old institution.

“She was a force,” Rachel Dyer OPC ’92 remembered. Glascott offered encouragement and understanding, made herself available without being overprotective; she lobbied for adequate practice space and locker rooms for girls. “We knew we could always go to her office and she would hear us and fight for us,” Dyer said.

A competitive swimmer in high school, Glascott took up a coaching position in PC’s aquatics program as it was reconstituting as a co-ed, cross-divisional squad of 6-12th graders. She also lent her talents to the nascent girls lacrosse and field hockey teams—though with significantly less confidence, by her own admission.

In 2011 a group of alumni created the Women’s Legacy Fund to support the continued development of girls sports at PC through clinics, events and mentorship opportunities. The fund was dedicated to four teacher-coaches who were influential during those early years of girls athletics: Glascott, Liz Flemming Hon. 1689, Cheryl Irving Hon. 1689 and Debbie White.

“There were other women faculty who came and went, but none who were as invested and who stayed as long and gave their heart to the program like they did,” said Dyer, who served on the Legacy Fund’s executive committee. “Those four really stood out to us.”

Debbie White came to Penn Charter as head of girls athletics in 1989 and first got to know Glascott through her work on the pool deck. Even back then, White could sense that her colleague was poised to shape the school in ways that went beyond the scope of a swim coach and science teacher—whether Glascott knew it or not.

“She did it all,” White said. “You could tell that she was ready to lead.”

Modeling Community

The year was 1991. Penn Charter’s first modern coed class was nearing its graduation, and Aly Goodner OPC ’96 sat in Beth Glascott’s seventh grade advisory group, earnestly scrawling away in a notebook.

Topics of identity and human sexuality figured prominently in the Middle School advisory curriculum, and during this particular lesson the seventh graders were writing poems about a time when they felt vulnerable. Goodner never expected that the assignment itself would lead to a moment of vulnerability, but that’s just what happened when her friend, a boy, plucked the notebook out from under her and started reading Goodner’s poem-in-progress out loud.

Glascott saw the scene unfolding—with Goodner becoming visibly upset—and quickly stepped in to head off further harm. The intervention didn’t stop with discipline, though, and after addressing the prankster directly, Glascott opened up a conversation with the rest of the class. “She made it abundantly clear that our own personal identities are never to be used for someone else’s entertainment,” Goodner said.

In the wake of the incident, Glascott led the two classmates through a process of reconciliation. Her support, and her ability to turn an unkind joke into a teaching opportunity, have stuck with Goodner to this day. Goodner and the prankster are still friends to this day, too; she doesn't know if that would have been possible without Glascott.

“We were able to move forward because of that process,” Goodner said. “Beth made a space for us to repair things privately but also bring it back as a class. Throughout the whole process she kept checking in with me.” Goodner, now director of PC’s Center for Public Purpose and co-clerk of the Gender Equity, Sexuality & Consent Task Force, finds that Glascott brings the same sensitivity and wisdom to her administrative leadership. “In the work that I do with her as a colleague it’s really exciting,” she said. “We're thinking collectively about who we want to be as a community and how we can ensure our faculty members are modeling that.”

Glascott briefly coached Middle School girls lacrosse along with PC's first head of girls athletics, Jane Diamond (pictured, right).

Bioethics

In the early 2000s, Glascott partnered with colleague Tom Rickards to develop a course called Bioethics, channeling her passion for interdisciplinary science into a popular Upper School elective that introduces students to the moral dimensions of biology and health care.

Rickards, a religion teacher and PC’s coordinator of environmental stewardship and sustainability, taught Bioethics with Glascott through her final semester in early 2022, bringing the pair into the kind of close, long-term collaboration that’s relatively rare among Upper School faculty. Reflecting on Glascott’s approach to students, Rickards invokes a model of ethics formulated by psychologist Carol Gilligan—a mainstay of the Bioethics syllabus—that distinguishes between a “justice perspective” and a “care perspective.”

A justice perspective on ethics is formal and prescriptive: What are the rules and how do we hold people accountable? A care perspective emphasizes human psychology and relationships: What does this person need and how can I help satisfy those needs?

Both have their place, according to Rickards, and Glascott was an expert at harmonizing the two. “Beth always knew which perspective to use when,” he said. “She was able to hold kids accountable and make sure they were doing their best work”—the justice perspective—“but she always knew when they needed extra support, too.”

In the classroom and administrative offices alike, Glascott’s vision was consistently student-centered. Rickards remembers how, as director of Upper School, she stood firm in her support for a policy limiting homework over academic breaks, despite pushback from a handful of faculty. “It was something really basic like, ‘Give students one night of homework over break,’” Rickards remembered. Glascott’s rejoinder to reluctant teachers was uncomplicated and hard to argue with: “She said, ‘Don’t you want a break? Don’t you want to be with your families? Why wouldn’t we want that for our kids?’”

To Rickards, it was an example of Glascott engaging in “plain speech,” the Quaker custom of direct, honest communication in alignment with one’s sense of ethics. He admired and appreciated his colleague’s ability to speak plainly, as a teaching partner and division head.

“It was always clear to me where she stood and why she was making the decisions that she did,” Rickards said.

Debbie White, Cheryl Irving Hon. 1689, Glascott and Liz Flemming Hon. 1689 were honored by the Women's Legacy Fund in 2011 for their role in shaping the girls athletics program at PC. Former Head of School Earl Ball calls Glascott “one of the major architects of coeducation at Penn Charter."

Grace

Until her final days at Penn Charter, Glascott was committed to fostering a more equitable and inclusive school community. She is especially proud of her stewardship of the Grace Fund, PC’s full-access fund created to pay the cost of items and activities not covered by tuition or financial aid. Administering the Grace Fund gave Glascott an opportunity to build relationships with families in the course of addressing their specific needs—and another occasion to put Carol Gilligan’s care perspective into practice.

And just as her parents passed on their love of summer camp in New England to Glascott and her siblings, Glascott shares her love of Penn Charter with her own children, Alex Macy OPC ’00 and Louisa Macy Gulinson OPC ’03, and her grandson, Jack Macy, Class of 2031.

Glascott remained passionate about connecting with students even as her teaching schedule lightened in her final years at PC. Amanda Ehrenhalt, Class of 2022, never had Glascott as a teacher or advisor, but the pair developed a mentorship of sorts, meeting regularly to talk about Ehrenhalt’s interests in environmental justice and her work on the Race & Equity Task Force.

“It was just one of those serendipitous kind of things,” Glascott recalled. “I say hello to a lot of people—some kids respond and some don’t—and Amanda responded.”

It didn’t take long for Ehrenhalt to realize that Glascott could be a model for the kind of work she was doing to improve school culture at Penn Charter. “Ms. Glascott knew how challenging coming into Penn Charter would be as a woman, and she still did it and she was so successful,” Ehrenhalt said.

The senior characterized her relationship with Glascott as one of recognition and support, based on mutual respect and understanding. More than the specific content of their talks, Ehrenhalt remembers the deep sense of acknowledgment she was left with after those meetings: “I felt like a person. I didn’t feel like a check-in,” she said. “[Glascott is] doing all these jobs and all these things, but she’s still taking the time to get to know you as a human being— really trying to get to know you.”

The essence of Glascott’s message, as Ehrenhalt understood it, was something like this: “I see what you're trying to accomplish at Penn Charter, I know what you must be going through as a girl, and I'm here to help you succeed.”

It was a message many others heard before her, no doubt. Who knows what manner of success it has inspired. PC